Environmentalists criticized the package — as did many developing countries in the debate — for failing to address what they called the most urgent issue, to move faster and deeper in cutting carbon emissions.

“The good news is we avoided a train wreck,” said Alden Meyer, recalling predictions a few days ago of a likely failure. “The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve.”

…………………………………

nature.com blog ;

After a long debate, South Africa’s Maite Nkoana-Mashabane sought to broker a spontaneous compromise that has been years in the making by forcing negotiators to work out their differences on the floor of the plenary, in plain view and earshot of media and anyone else willing to push their way into a crowd (or onto a chair). All of this took place at 3 a.m. Sunday morning, making Durban the longest of 17 annual conferences convened by signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Be the cause clever politicking, schoolyard peer pressure or sheer fatigue, it worked. After some 45 minutes of shifting scrums punctuated by occasional applause, India, the European Union, the United States and other key players worked out their differences on a host of interrelated issues. This time it came down to five words: “agreed outcome with legal force”. To recap, the final language states that countries will begin new negotiations on “a protocol, another legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force,” which apparently falls somewhere in the legal spectrum between a binding treaty and a nonbinding decision. Both India and the EU promptly dropped their objections.

The so-called “Durban package” was adopted shortly before 5 a.m. Sunday. It extends the Kyoto Protocol and commits the world to negotiating a new agreement by 2015 that covers all countries, developed and developing. Among other things, it also advances some details of the new Green Climate Fund established last year in Cancun as well as language intended to promote efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation. Despite universal acknowledgements that the deal does nothing to reduce emissions or increase funding beyond existing commitments, environmentalists and scientists generally endorsed the decision as a significant step that could put all major emitters onto the same playing field in the years to come

Speaking to RTCC in the Plenary Hall, the UK’s lead climate diplomat John Ashton said the talks had been a success, adding the roadmap and accompanying measures “represented closure” after Copenhagen.

Chris Huhne, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, warned there was still work to do but was enthusiatic about the deal. “There are still many details to be hammered out, but we now need to start negotiating the new legal agreement as soon as possible and there are still many details to be hammered out,” he said.

Adrian Macey, Chair of AWG-KP, the track of the talks dealing with Kyoto said: “We’ve got a package with clarity on the Kyoto Protocol, and importantly we also have clarity on the long term too, and it’s quite momentus I think looking at this longer term agreement. Better than people expected.”

Norway’s Climate Change Minister Erik Solheim told RTCC they were “very, very pleased, it’s in the upper range of what we hoped for. We’re pleased both with the substantive outcome and also the agreement on this process.

“For us this is a great outcome. The key aspect is that it is crucial, when you have a Kyoto Protocol with limited scope…[it’s] crucial we get a legally binding framework for all major emitters and that’s the core here. It’s also important the deadline for the negotiation process is not too far into the future. So it’s the ambition level and also the urgency. We have somethig to take climate action forward and we now have an ambitious pathway to go forward,” said Solheim.

U.N. climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, agreed a package of measures early on Sunday that would eventually force all the world’s polluters to take legally binding action to slow the pace of global warming.

After more than two weeks of intense talks, some 190 countries agreed to four main elements — a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, the design of a Green Climate Fund and a mandate to get all countries in 2015 to sign a deal that would force them to cut emissions no later than 2020, as well as a workplan for next year.